Flipboard has a number of events flipping on its board as it has roped in ‘USA Today’. With this, it now brings the national newspaper on the iOS app. Surprisingly, there are signs indicating that the content of the newspaper would be delivered 24/7 to one’s iPad, completely free to access.
Flipboard has been quite famous, even before the start of the current year, as in December 2010, the iOS app won the title of ‘Apple’s iPad App of the Year’, as selected by the company. If that was not enough, the ‘USA Today’ integration would have the company praising its app. In a statement, Josh Quittner, editorial director for Flipboard said, “USA Today’s founder Al Neuharth was known as an innovator, and we think it’s not exactly a coincidence that USA TODAY also happens to be the first national U.S. newspaper available on Flipboard.” But he had a lot more to add on to the topic as he continued saying, “USA Today’s Flipboard version contains customized layouts and a unique story mix drawing from the entire newspaper, including up-to-the-minute items from its iconic News, Money, Sports, and Life sections.”
This integration seems to be coming in because of Flipboard’s hard earned impressive audience, which was the result of its app’s interface and distribution capabilities. But other national magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Oprah, in addition to European newspapers like The Guardian and The Telegraph, all have their own portals of-sorts within Flipboard itself. This shows that Flipboard has added a ‘national newspaper’ gem to its app, making it only better.
Quittner was recently interviewed by Cnet’s Laura Locke, wherein he said, “I think our aim is to handle all media at some point, but we wanted to start with magazines because [Mike McCue, Flipboard’s founder/CEO] is a real magazine nut. He loves magazines. He loves the beauty of magazines. And I think he sort of felt if we could do that, then we could do any of it.”
Talking about the USA Today version of Flipboard, one would find “contains customized layouts and a unique story mix drawing from the entire paper, including up-to-the-minute items from its iconic News, Sports, Money, and Life sections.”
Confidence of the Flipboard team has been quite impressive, which has led the startup to pump in more than $60 million of venture funding in the bank. But they emphasis that their concentration still is on its presentation, content delivery and its media partnerships. They however, do not rule out that they would look out for advertising, which would come into play later on with an assumed objective to turn the ‘self-sustaining’ mode on, in a manner that doesn’t hack off its consumer base. Further detailing on the advertising note, it is certain that once Flipboard manages to integrate advertising into its content, it’s going to have a healthy user base to draw from in that regard.
Last month, McCue had spoken at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, wherein he said that the app is currently an ‘iPad only’ app, but still its popularity can be noted as the app has been downloaded 3.5 million times already. For the page views, he said that the app’s users serve up more than 550 million page views per month.
Flipboard might even be working on its iPhone compatible app, which would mean that iPhone users will even be able to enjoy the same benefits as one does on an iPad with this app.